I don’t talk about depression or self-injury all that much anymore. It’s still very much a part of my history and shapes the choices I make, and I live with a constant awareness that either or both of those things could swallow me up again any minute. It’s a very typical profile of a self-injurer, a female who cut herself as a teenager and perhaps in her early twenties, is able to stop for a few years, and then starts up again in her mid-twenties, more seriously than ever, and with less chance of being able to stop again.

So that’s all there, in a corner of my head I don’t go too often anymore, but that I’m always aware is there. And then every once in a while like today someone asks me about it, usually someone I’ve forgotten even knows, and I’m transported back there all over again.

And there I am, fourteen and crying on my bedroom floor, or nineteen and locked in a dorm bathroom with a razor blade. Or twenty or twenty-one, no longer cutting, but still lying awake some nights late into the night running my hands over the fading scars. Cataloguing, chanting my own personal litany. When each one happened, where, why, how. There was a girl once, in one of my classes, who saw the marks on my leg once when my skirt had slipped up. She came up to me after class and told me she knew what that was like, and that I could talk to her anytime. And she gave me a hug and told me to be careful. I never did talk to her about it, and I don’t remember her name or what ever happened to her, but I still remember her opening up like that to some girl she barely knew, and I want to cry and wish I could thank her.

This can be so hard to talk about.

Which is why I do it, now, when someone asks because they hurt themselves, or have a friend who does, and they want to know what to do. I don’t have the answers but I talk anyway, because half of the problem is about not talking. It’s about secrecy and shame and the only thing I know to do about that is to keep talking whenever you have the chance, even if you’re not sure what to say, even if it hurts and is scary and you think maybe people are going to laugh or not like you anymore.

So here I am twenty-five, scars gone, still taking a moment every morning to stop and look at a tattoo that symbolizes a promise, feeling it slightly raised like one last scar, reminding myself all over again that I promised to love myself more, to care for myself better, not to hurt myself anymore. Because it’s not a decision I made once, it’s a decision I make over and over, sometimes every day, and I suspect it’s a decision I’ll have to keep making day by day until I die. So I take the moment, and I remember, and I make the promise again. And then I go about my day and don’t think about it much, until someone gives me the chance to talk about it. And then I do.